links for 2008-05-09

Earlier this week fellow St. Louisian Bob McCarty who writes the blog Bob McCarty Writes sent me a link for some photos he had taken at Lambert St Louis Airport of the American Airlines pilots who were apparently picketing for their cause, customer service. Bob also posted about this.

Bob asked in his post whether protests like this do more harm than good. Finger pointing in the middle of a crisis often does more harm than good.

As everyone knows, this has just been a really bad week for the airlines business in general; especially American.

But that customer service sticky wicket.…

As American Airlines canceled flights last week, Hitwise noted a 74% increase in visits to social networks and forums. Customer service was most likely a hot topic.

As Internet Marketing Blog by NonanNight notes on April 16th , there were 134,000 results for “American Airlines sucks” on Google. Perhaps a data point for customer service.

Bruce Temkin at Forrester gives American a D+ for customer service as it related directly to their website. For his grades, he refers to his four componenets of good customer service, ACES:

Accountability (take responsibility for fixing the problem)
Communication (clearly communicate the process and set expectations)
Empathy (acknowledge the impact that the situation has on the customer)
Solution (at the end of the day, make sure to solve the problem)

American launched their own blog and assured the public on April 13th that AA Service Had Returned to Normal. If I were giving grades for blogs, this one would get an “F”. As passenger dissatisfaction continues to be expressed, they quickly moved on from “normal” to another topic, airline consolidation and then nothing on their blog since April 15th.

American Airlines and those folks on their own blogs and social networks may have a different definition of “normal.” Read what Janis Petit, Julie McManus, and Terry Maxon among others have to say.

So, calling all airlines including American, pilots, employees and management: this is made up of lots of messes; listen to what is being said.

Finally, I really do have a question for the picketing pilots: Have you all ever heard of Eastern Airlines?

Thanks for the link to your photos, Bob.

AT&T: It Doesn’t Look Good, Girls.

Posted by Marianne Richmond on April 19th, 2008

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Posted in: Current Affairs, Families Tags: AT&T, Media 2.0, wireless, WSJ

AT&T announced layoff of 4600 workers yesterday. The article in today’s Wall Street noted that AT&T explained the layoff as mostly “white collar” jobs because consumers are dropping their AT&T landlines.

They also announced that a similar number of new jobs would be created in more promising businesses such as wireless, television and broadband.

AT&T spokesman Mr Sharp explained to the WSJ that jobs would not be found for their laid off employees”for a variety of reasons” because the new jobs were different.

To paraphrase that other BOSS, the jobs are gone girls, and they ain’t coming back.

Or as John Hodulick, an analyst for UBS explained clearly,

“There will be quite a bit of cost savings in this plan since it will impact a lot of senior executives and white-collar workers, who are generally more highly paid, and replace them with guys in trucks getting U-Verse into peoples’ homes,” he added, referring to AT&T’s television and high-speed Internet offering.”

So, gentleman…..start your engines!